My Friend Dahmer

I remember reading a page on the net several years ago, which was a cartoon detailing a fishing trip with Jeffrey Dahmer and a friend when they were teenagers. On this trip, young Jeff caught a sunfish and, instead of throwing it back as his friend asked, he proceeded to chop it to death with a pocket knife.

I have always remembered this, but have never found the page again.

Just this past Sunday I found out it was part of an actual book called My Friend Dahmer, written by Derf Backderf. So I checked out the Amazon Look Inside bits, and was interested enough to get a copy. It arrived Monday, and I've been through it twice since then.

It's not so much the drawing style, which is basically R Crumb, but the haunting story it tells of Dahmer before he became a serial killer, when he was a child and something might have been done for him, if the adults around him had only looked up from their own self-absorption and seen there was something terribly terribly wrong. Backderf makes no bones about his sympathy (pity, really) for Dahmer ending when Dahmer committed his first murder; however, he also draws an unflinching picture of Dahmer's loneliness, his isolation from others and from his family, and his (Backderf's) own participation in making Dahmer feel less than human.

I'm a contemporary of the kids depicted in this book -- I graduated high school in 1975, they graduated in 1978. I was an outcast, and was bullied about as badly as Dahmer. I was pretty much ignored by my parents and the teachers. But why didn't I become a serial killer? Why am I reasonably well adjusted, and have been a contributing member of society for lo, these 40 some odd years since graduation? What makes one person become an average wife/mom/worker bee, and one person the worst serial killer in recent history?

I think those are all questions that keep me turning back to this book, and that make me recommend it to all y'all out there. There are no graphic depictions of murder, death or gore -- a couple of illustrations of roadkill and one incident which shows that Dahmer, even in his descent into madness, still retained a core of humanity and kindness many "normal" people don't have. At least until he finally crossed the line and became a murderer.

Well worth the money, well worth the read.

First off, let me just say that I couldn't put this book down. It was both fascinating and disturbing and fulfilled that strange curiosity that comes up whenever you read an account of someone so disturbed that they engage in the most heinous acts imaginable. How could they be that way? What must go wrong inside of them to allow them to do such things? And what were they like as teenagers? Well, that last question may not be typical, and it was only after reading the premise of the book that I really thought about it. Would there be signs at that age? What is the reaction of people close to such psychopaths to learn about the reality that lies behind the mask of sanity?

Well, in that department, My Friend Dahmer delivers. There's plenty an anecdote to inspire nervous laughter, wide-eyed disbelief, and stunned disappointment at all the missed opportunities that might have prevented such a despicable spree of murder. Dahmer's antics in high school were odd, to say the least, and betrayed very early on a remarkable lack of empathy and capacity for manipulation, as well as the growth of the necrophiliac desires that would prompt his many murders.

But I think it's in Dahmer's capacity for manipulation that the book suffers. It seems to me that even with the benefit of hindsight, Backderf might be buy into Dahmer's story of himself a tad too much. Backderf (but he's not the only one) presents what he believes to be the motivation and psychological history that led to the man Dahmer became: a broken home, absent parents, strange and shameful desires. It's a story that inspires pity (but not necessarily compassion, as Backderf himself writes). But is it the truth? After all the reading I've done on psychopathy and character disorders, I highly doubt it. The only 'witness' we have for what was really going on in Dahmer's mind during all these events is Dahmer himself, and psychopaths are experts at presenting themselves in a sympathetic light, no matter what degree of depravity they have sunk to. It's called impression management and it has one goal: to convince the person listening that the psychopath really isn't that different from you or me. It's a cover story to keep someone from reaching the conclusion that in reality, this person is a human predator, with absolutely no conscience or remorse. If you watch the clips of interviews with Dahmer before he was murdered in prison, you can see it in action: the way Dahmer uses the interviewer's questions and subtle suggestions to both admit what he can't reasonably deny, but frame it in such a way that it's not quite as bad as all that. He leaves the listener to fill int he blanks.

This problem about the way we interpret the words of psychopaths, and all the other manipulation techniques they use, is discussed at length in George Simon's book [[ASIN:1935166336 Character Disturbance: the phenomenon of our age]], which I'll be reviewing soon. So, if you want a bit more insight into the minds of people like Dahmer, read that one. It makes a good companion to My Friend Dahmer, which despite its flaws, was still pretty damn good.

This is an amazing, very personal memoir of a high-school nobody who is now remembered as a monster. It in no way absolves Dahmer, but it humanizes him to the extent where we can see him as a person. Not that we can see what went on in his head, but the context in which he lost it. This is a very personal story, but Derf has filled it in with outside research (without stepping out of the personal story) and the (text) timeline at the end fills in the horror story for those who don't know any or all the story.
I've been reading Derf for ages, and he's one of my favorites. I love his comix. His other book [[ASIN:1593621353 Punk Rock and Trailer Parks]] is a boisterous remembering of the punk era in the 80s. My Friend Dahmer is not happy or uplifting. But it's a gripping story of alienation, neglect and everyday inattention.
All the characters you remember from high school are in this book. And also a serial killer.

In "My Friend Dahmer" Derf Backderf has created a work that should be required reading for all school counselors, educators, and indeed anyone with an interest in the psychology of alienated outsiders. This is probably the single best work on the early origins of a serial killer that has ever seen print. All the warning signs of troubled youth are presented clearly in a very engrossing manner. The work is tastefully done. The art, while cartoonish, sets a great mood for the story. The horrid excess of Jeff Dahmer's crimes are left unseen, as it should be. What is truly fascinating about people like Dahmer is not the gory details of their violence, but the psychology that unleashes such horrors.

Derf really captures the essence of high school of that era. I was an early 80s student, myself, and little had changed by that point. I knew plenty of people much like the ones shown here. As a Dungeons & Dragons nerd, I too was near the bottom of the social ladder, much like Derf and Dahmer were. I can attest to the authenticity of Derf's portrayal of high school life of 30-odd years ago. As I read, I found myself wondering about the whereabouts of marginal characters I knew in my own school, like "Einerschteiner", "Squiddy" and the infamous "Onion". I'm just glad I haven't read about them in the newspapers.

Derf himself had a ringside seat to the genesis of notorious serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer's psychosis as a teen in 1970s small town Ohio. Derf was the leader of a group of self-described "band nerds" who associated with Dahmer in a strange blend of hero worship, fascination, pity, and disgust. Derf and his friends based a whole quasi-mythology and much of their banter and social interactions on Dahmer's desperate and bizarre attempts to gain peer acceptance through sick humor. Dahmer seems to have deeply infiltrated almost every aspect of Derf and friends' high school life. One is reminded of Alfred Jarry's creation of his absurdist play, Ubu Roi, based on stories he and his school friends made up about their strange and eccentric physics teacher.

Derf generally treats Dahmer as sympathetically as possible, noting how his disturbed behavior and alcoholism, while blatantly obvious to his peers, was overlooked by every single adult in Dahmer's life. Derf even shows how he and his friends egged Dahmer on to ever greater lengths of weirdness and unacceptable behavior, culminating in an unforgettable trip to a local mall where they paid Dahmer $35 to run amok for two hours. Ironically, this episode was the 'last straw' that resulted in their disassociation from him due to discomfort with his ever-worsening freakish persona.

I cannot give this any less than five stars, however one area that I think Derf held back on was the central character of Dahmer. I'm not saying he should have showed his killings or grotesque fantasies, I just think Derf consciously or unconsciously tended to dehumanize Dahmer, rendering him more as a caricature of a lunatic than an actual human being. The scenes of Dahmer alone or with his parents do not have this problem, just the scenes of his interactions with others in his peer group. I do understand that Dahmer had this crazed persona he hid behind at school, but I am sure he was a little more articulate than presented here, especially with the members of Derf's "Dahmer Fan Club". Clues in the end notes to Derf's book reinforce this, as well as the articulate nature of the interviews with Dahmer that I have seen in documentaries.

In the book, Dahmer's dialogue is mainly restricted to loud exclamations of "THMAAAA!" and "BAAAAA!". (This is a depiction of Dahmer's cruel mockery of a handicapped man who was employed by his mother.) However, in an actual 70s high school year book cartoon done by Derf and included in the text, many quoted "Dahmerisms" are included that prove that Dahmer was in fact possessed of an eccentric and somewhat obscure sense of humor, rather than being a non-stop bellowing lunatic. Unfortunately Derf only allows Dahmer to act as a real human in a couple of scenes; notably, one where he manages to maneuver himself and several classmates into a meeting with Vice President Mondale during a trip to Washington DC.

Understandably, Derf must have wanted to distance himself from Dahmer as much as possible in the making of this book. He had the unenviable task of telling the story of his boyhood friendship with one of the most horrible serial killers of modern times while at the same time avoiding being tarred with the same brush, so to speak. Derf constantly throws in little anecdotes to emphasize the normalcy of his own life as he recounts the bizarreness of Dahmer's. Perhaps Derf was reluctant to show himself and his friends interacting with Dahmer on any level deeper than a "bemused observer" capacity. Certainly, Dahmer was a real weirdo, but it would have been fascinating if Derf had added one or two scenes where Dahmer actually interacted a little with his peers. Undoubtedly there must have been incidents like that, as I doubt someone of Derf's imagination and intellect would have been so thoroughly captivated by a guy whose sole schtick was a loud, ugly impression of a cerebral palsy sufferer.

All in all, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It would have been interesting to see at least one or two of Dahmer's more lucid interactions with classmates, and to find out a bit about how he functioned academically (I understand his IQ was about 145), but these are very small complaints indeed given the general exceptional quality of this book. We may still not know the whole explanation behind the descent into horrific madness of an intelligent, pleasant looking boy with a well-to-do family and a caring father, but Derf's graphic novel does as much or more to explain it as any of the other literature on this all-around tragic subject. Five Stars.

Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He became infamous after his 1991 arrest and 1992 conviction, when he received 15 life terms, only to be murdered by a fellow inmate in 1994. Dahmer has become part of America's serial-killer history and infamy, in part because of the gory horror of the murders which included rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism.

But before he was the `The Milwaukee Cannibal' and `The Milwaukee Monster', Jeffrey Dahmer attended Eastview Junior High and later Revere High School, with John Backderf (who illustrates under the pseudonym Derf and Derf Backderf). In fact, Backderf while not close friends with Dahmer, was part of the `Dahmer Fan Club'; a group of self-proclaimed `nerds' who were fringe-friends of Dahmer's, and in 1991 would be interviewed by detectives about Dahmer's first murder of a hitchhiker called Stephen Hicks.

It was John Backderf's bizarre pseudo-friendship with the man who would go on to become one of America's most infamous serial-killers that prompted him to first write a short comic anthology about growing up with Dahmer, published in 1997. From there, Backderf explains in the preface to `My Friend Dahmer', that he continued to muse on his high school memories of the boy, to the point that he released a self-published comic book version of what would later become the graphic novel `My Friend Dahmer', published this year by Abrams ComicArts.

The novel follows Dhamer's schooling from the moment that Backderf actually remembers noticing him in Junior High. Through to the days before graduation and his last encounters with the now adult Dhamer who would go on to commit his first murder shortly thereafter. In the novel Backderf shines light on a loner teenager, struggling with a crumbling home life and frightening impulses; and when we wasn't fading into the background at school, he was being bullied by the jocks or relegated to a cafeteria table with the other 'freaks'.

Reading Backderf's preface you get the impression that he has a small obsession with Dahmer, which is entirely understandable. For one thing, it's not many people who can claim they went to school with one of the nation's most famous serial-killers. And, in fact, in a chilling recount towards the end of the novel, Backderf shares the story of his high school friend, Mike, the last of their gang to interact with Dahmer when he saw him walking on the side of the road one night and offered him a lift home. Later, as the timeline of Dahmer's murders was constructed (he first killed at the age of 18) Mike would come to realize that as he sat in the Dahmer driveway, there was a dismembered body either stuffed in a drainage pipe beside the driveway, or in the back of Dahmer's car "which was parked just a few yards away." Such thoughts would no doubt swirl in a person's mind, and you'd think back to all those classes in which you sat next to a man who would one day commit such heinous acts. . .

For another, Backderf and his small, nerdy clique were probably the closest thing Dahmer ever had to a real friendship, and may well be who he spoke of in a 1993 interview with Nancy Glass for `Inside Edition', when he said: "I had normal friendships in high school. . . and really never had any close friendships after high school."

This is an unsettling thought while reading `My Friend Dahmer', and I simultaneously praise and raise my eyebrow at John Backderf's honesty. Because you soon discover that the measly crumbs Jeffrey Dahmer probably mistook for friendship from Backderf and his gang was really quite awful. The `Dahmer Fan Club' to which Backderf and his three close friends were part of was an inside-joke, of sorts, praising Jeffrey Dahmer's bizarre impersonations of a cerebral palsy sufferer (thought to be imitating a local interior decorator, who suffered from the condition, but in his research Backderf would discover was actually Dahmer imitating his own mother who was a depressive and on some 20 different prescriptive medications that made her twitch and lurch).

`My Friend Dahmer' proves to be a collection of Backderf's unsettling accounts of his personal interactions with Dahmer, and more thorough back-story he gathered from local residents, past classmates and teachers and then deeper diggings through FBI and television transcripts, interviews with lawyers and reporters from the time. Some recounts of Jeffrey Dahmer have clearly gone down in Revere High School history - such as the opening panels depicting Jeffrey showing a group of boys his `hut', where he kept road-kill he stuffed into jars of acid (to study the bones, he said.) Residents who lived near the tucked-away Dahmer residence would later confess to finding dead animals hammered to various telephone poles and trees, not thinking anything of it until much later, with Dahmer's 1991 arrest.

But much of Backderf's back-story to Dahmer's formative years is gathered, directly and indirectly, from the man himself. This surprised me; I confess to knowing very little of the Jeffrey Dahmer case before I started reading `My Friend Dahmer', but even finer details like Dahmer struggling with his homosexuality and dark thoughts of necrophilia seemed to be too much a shot in the dark. But, as it turns out, part of the reason for Dahmer's later notoriety is thanks to his awful honesty. As Backderf says in his notes; "Jeff was remarkably forthright with the police, unlike most serial killers, who are either pathological liars, like Henry Lee Lucas, or manipulative psychopaths, like Charles Manson. Dahmer was truthful and coherent." Indeed he was. Dahmer spoke candidly about his sexual impulses, his struggle with alcoholism (he was an alcoholic by the time he was a senior in high school, trying to numb his dark impulses) and the negative impact his parent's fighting, and later divorce, had on him growing up.

`My Friend Dahmer' is in many ways a dark, depressing read. Particularly when Backderf starts asking why adults never gave a damn about Dahmer's spiralling decline - his alcoholism, crumbling home life and ostracism in particular. In his preface, Backderf says: "It's my belief that Dahmer didn't have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn't have to die horribly, if only adults in his life hadn't been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent." This thought is maybe distilled in a small window of Dahmer's life, a week-long school trip to Washington D.C. when Dahmer's ability to lie creatively and astoundingly scored him and two classmates a meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale. A mind that could pull that off, on the spur of the moment, and later be capable of molesting children and killing 17 people, as Backderf says; ". . . what a waste."

But Backderf makes it very clear that his sympathy for Dhamer ended the moment he killed; "He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people."

`My Friend Dhamer' is an unsettling read. And for me, newly initiated into the graphic novel form, it is a confusingly sad, impacting, disturbing and brilliant read that highlights what can be gained from the graphic medium. Backderf's artwork is sinister and detailed, often mixing his old high-school drawings of Dhamer with class photos (one in which a teacher blacked out Dhamer's face with a marker) - these images are much like the narrative story itself, with Backderf's personal recollections interspersed with hard facts gathered from various sources. I'm convinced that if Backderf hadn't been an artist, if he'd just written his high school memories of Dhamer mixed with his fact-finding then he would not have had a story worth telling. But it's Backderf's artwork that disarms you and draws you into the heinously sad and frightening life of Jeffrey Dahmer - this lumbering, solitary drawn boy who seems to haunt the page, much the way that his memory obviously still haunts John Backderf.

I really wanted to like this book. I thought it would be good since the topic of the story is a very interesting one. However, the book gave hardly any insight into Dahmer. The author of the book wasn't even really friends with him. He was just interested in his behavior and pretty much only used him as a source of entertainment. I really felt like I got nothing out of the book. While it was short, it was a waste of time to read. I would have learned 10x the information by simply googling him. I think the title is very misleading as Backderf and his friends were horrible to Dahmer and now, he's using that "friendship" as a way to make money.

I have read many a book about serial killers, and loads of graphic novels, and my "favourite" serial killer probably is Jeffrey Dahmer, which is why I had such a hard time with this book.

The author tried to explain Dahmer, and to plainly describe what Dahmer was like in school; at this, I have to say it seems like he is telling the truth. I mean, Dahmer was, judging from a lot of accounts that I have read from over the years, quite an invisible character, until he decided to become a spaz, a class clown, the Peter Sellers of the school, so to speak, where he was no longer himself but indistinguishable from a made-up character.

The problems I have with this book are legion, but based on two things:

1. The author describes Dahmer as a "MONSTER" and continually falls into a trap where he somehow decides that Dahmer wasn't a human being, but keeps describing him as though he's a Boris Karloff monster, á la The Crypt Keeper; this never happens in great non-fiction

2. The author makes claims that he has no real basis for, e.g. how Dahmer "must have felt" at night, or during other points in time

Still, it's interesting to get more of a feel of Joyce and Lionel Dahmer's relationship; these are Jeffrey's parents, and their disintegrating marriage is interesting to know more of.

All in all: useful if you're a real Dahmer fan, but please, sift through the unknown and all the camp theatric ploys used here.

This book is not memorable.

I finished it in an hour, with a solid attempt at appreciating the lackluster artwork. The pages are extremely thick, leading one to think that it contains much more content than it actually does. It's short. Strangely enough, it's also redundant.

I expected the author to present some insight into Dahmer's childhood/teenage years. However, his childhood was exactly what you would have guessed, and the author provides little about Dahmer's life. Just the repetitious "We all ostracized him. He killed some animals in the woods (which is never really shown). He almost killed people (and stops the story as soon as he actually does). He drank a lot. His parents ostracized him." But it was the same thing over and over. May as well have reused the tiles. And it was presented in such a boring manner. You're not supposed to get bored in less than 200 pages of a comic book about a serial killer, easily read in an hour. I was left with many questions, including: "Did the author even know anything about him?" and "Is this the best person to have written this book?"

I didn't learn anything from this book, I wasn't entertained by this book, I wasn't appreciative of the art or form of this book, and nothing stands out in my mind. Every time I've read a book, I've felt inclined to turn to a friend and say, "Hey did you know..." But this book does not leave me with that inclination. You will learn zip about the Dahmer case, the Dahmer psyche, the Dahmer childhood, other than what you may have assumed. The first paragraph of the Jeffrey Dahmer Wikipedia page can certainly provide more info and entertainment.

In the prologue, the author "toots his own horn" about the quality of his artwork and about the extensive research that went into writing this book. Upon completion, these statements were laughable. In the epilogue, he cites his sources for many of the moments in the book. But they were stupid moments that had little impact on the creation of a story. He had to do research to present a moment where Dahmer opens up the library door and shouts the librarian's name? And cite it? What a waste of time. He could have made up that trite little moment, just like the other trite moments depicted throughout. These moments did not aid in the development in the story or the character. It was senseless redundancy.

The author seems to have a bit of underlying guilt for ostracizing Dahmer. The book seems to be a bit of "ventilation" or cleansing of that guilt- Something that could have been potentially developed. Maybe that's the better story here? I think if the Dahmer case was your entire life, if you knew him, if the moment was "shocking" rather than just "messed up and twisted" than you'd find this book essential. Otherwise, take a pass on this one. I'll be selling mine.

This was my first graphic novel and I guess maybe I just don't get it. Graphic novels have never interested me (I've never even cracked one open), but when I saw the topic of this one, I immediately purchased it. I'm fascinated with what makes a serial killer and based on the reviews of this book, I thought I was going to get a unique perspective on what made Dahmer who he was. What I found instead was an extremely piecemeal and elementary delivery of fairly inconsequential memories and accounts. There wasn't one thing in the book that stood out at me as being overly tragic or surprising. Sure, it sounds like he had a rough life and an unfortunate upbringing...but so have a lot of people and not all of them become serial killers.

I must admit I was worried for a while that Backderf was excusing his place in the story of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, as someone who actually knew (as much as anyone was able to) and spent time with Dahmer in high school, to a rather blank excuse of, “That’s how things were back then.” But in recounting how Dahmer showed signs of alcoholism and sociopathy in high school in the late 70s, not to mention a fascination with dead animals, Backderf also provides interesting insights into the culture that would not make much effort to reach out to a kid like Dahmer.

It’s a classic tale, whether intentional or not, of all the horrendous factors that make cases of a disturbing kid like Dahmer easier to ignore, overlook or even use for a little amusement before putting him back out of mind. While we still struggle today with how to account for and address mental illness, with extremes that range from war cries that everyone is getting overmedicated to the equally uninformed Smile At People More campaign, Backderf provides a rather heartbreaking and brutally honest account of the miasma of adolescence that has so much baggage with it already, so where is there room to counsel a strange, bothered kid like Dahmer? Add to that a home life and a network of adults (including parents) who prefer to overlook problems than run headlong towards them, and you get a devastating tale of a budding serial killer in the early grips of his psychopathy and no one around ready or capable of addressing it. Not to mention our nagging human capacity to not be so fatalistic as to think that distant kid who reeks of alcohol and once sliced up a sun fish might one day store body parts in his apartment and drill holes in people’s skulls.